


Strange Collaborations

by lears_daughter



Category: Alias
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 09:55:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lears_daughter/pseuds/lears_daughter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A "missing two years" AU.  What if Julia had had a different partner during her missing years?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strange Collaborations

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Alias.

When Arvin Sloane learned that Sydney Bristow was dead, he killed the messenger.  
  
Then he went to her funeral and watched through a telescopic lens as her ashes were cast out to sea.   
  
After that, he planned to approach Jack about coordinating a revenge strike, something to give them both strength and purpose in the wake of the death of the most important person in their life. It was a shock, then, to discover—to his jealousy and displeasure—that Jack had already found a wanted fugitive with whom to join forces, and it wasn't Sloane.   
  
So instead, Sloane did something he had not planned on. He turned himself in to the CIA and cut a deal, and he began to build himself a new life as Arvin Sloane, Great Philanthropist. It was a lonely existence, and not nearly so gratifying as it had been to be Arvin Sloane, Evil Mastermind, but he found that it became easier and easier to endure as time went by. He could almost forget about Sydney, and Rambaldi (the two were so entwined in his mind as to be almost inseparable), and even Emily, poor Emily, who was the only person who had loved him after finding out what he was. He wondered often where Jack Bristow and Irina Derevko were, whether they were having any more luck than he in hunting down Sydney's killer.   
  
There were times when he was almost content.   
  
Which was why he was so displeased when the Covenant, an uppity new organization seeking to take the place of the Alliance, K-Directorate, and FTL, managed to dig up one of his skeletons he thought had been permanently squirreled away. It wasn't as though the CIA or NSA would be surprised to learn that he had been hiding a few things from them, but patriotic government officials tended to be rather prickly. It was quite possible that his execution, which had been postponed by his promise of good behavior, might be put back on the official roster were this particular skeleton to be revealed.   
  
And so he became a Covenant agent. Not a field agent, of course, at least not usually. No, he was more useful to them as a Rambaldi scholar with ties to other Rambaldi enthusiasts (obsessionists).   
  
The Covenant was smart, but not as smart as it thought it was. If they'd known how much Sloane kept to himself, how many times he'd purposefully destroyed or exchanged the objective for a useless fake, well...Sloane would probably have become a skeleton himself. There was a certain thrill to what he was doing, excitement that had a little to do with being back in the spy business and a lot to do with the feeling that this was bringing him somehow closer to Sydney—for she had practiced this very deception upon Sloane himself, and done it brilliantly.   
  
And perhaps it was because he was thinking of Sydney, and how she had had to work around Dixon all those years at SD-6 (Sloane still could not think about the man without a flash of red filling his vision, the red of Emily's blood on his hands, and sometimes he could not remember whose hands he was thinking of—Dixon's or his own), but it was anticipation and not disappointment that Sloane felt when he was informed, three months after he began working for the Covenant and ten months after Sydney's death, that he was being given a partner.   
  
"What is his name?" he asked when he was first told.   
  
His handler, an unpleasant fellow by the name of Karl, grinned and answered, "That would spoil the surprise."   
  
Sloane met his partner a week later, at a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. He was the last to arrive in his sleek sedan. A red convertible and black town car had beaten him there.   
  
Karl was lounging in front of the building, smirking like the cat that tortured the canary before eating it piece by piece. "Arvin," he said cordially.   
  
Sloane smiled pleasantly. "Karl."   
  
"Your partner is inside," Karl said, gesturing to the open door. Sloane did not understand the expression on the other man's face, wouldn't let it distract him.   
  
He stepped to the door, looked inside.   
  
Time froze. His heart stopped. His foot froze mid-air.   
  
Impossible.   
  
From a distance, he heard Karl say, "Arvin Sloane, this is Julia Thorne."   
  
Time resumed. Sloane felt his foot come down, not quite stumbling. And Sydney/Julia Bristow/Thorne/Derevko smiled coolly. Extended one slim arm and waited for him to dumbly take hold of her well-manicured hand. The shape and warmth of it were eminently familiar.   
  
"Arvin," she said in an impeccable British accent. "A pleasure to meet you."   
  
Sydney had never called him Arvin.   
  
"Julia," he managed after a pause, proud that his voice was even. "It is very good to meet _you_." He reluctantly released her hand, as if she might disappear when he lost contact. But she simply raised an eyebrow as she stepped back.   
  
"Karl," he said, not looking away from her face, fighting to keep his own expression bland. "May I have a moment outside, please." It was not a request. They stepped out of the warehouse, walked far enough away that she could not hear them. Then in a voice cold as ice and deadly as steel he hissed, "Explain."   
  
Karl did not seem to realize the precariousness of his position. He crossed his arms, leaned against a tree. "Explain what?"   
  
Many people had been deceived by Sloane's age and average stature into believing that he was not a physical threat. Few made that mistake twice.   
  
Quick as a cobra, Sloane moved in, his forearm darting up to press against Karl's windpipe. "Sydney. Bristow. Is. Dead," he said clearly, articulating each word as if that would somehow make them more true—or less true, maybe. For a moment he wasn't sure which he preferred. Because if it was true, if Sydney had been alive all this time, in the Covenant's clutches, then Sloane could feel the immense relief that would come at knowing that Rambaldi had not failed him, had not been a lie; but he would also face the devastating truth that he himself had failed Sydney.   
  
How could he have never doubted the reports of her death?   
  
Karl was remarkably unfazed by Sloane's assault. He stared at the older man, wheezing through the bare space in his windpipe, and croaked, "Yes. She is."   
  
Sloane released him, stepping away as though burnt.   
  
Karl straightened his suit, took a moment to relearn how to breathe. "Sydney Bristow is dead," he said again. "Don't forget it. Julia Thorne is very much _our_ creature."   
  
"What did you do to her?" Sloane demanded, still fighting for composure, aware that his face was twisting into something...frightening.   
  
Karl smirked. "You don't want to know,” he gloated, and Sloane resolved then and there that one day soon the man would die. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I have responsibilities elsewhere. Julia has been briefed on your next assignment. I suggest you return before she gets bored. She can be rather destructive."   
  
By “destructive,” it turned out, he meant that when left to herself Julia had a habit of carving disturbing pictures onto available surfaces. By the time Sloane returned to the warehouse, she was just finishing a charming rendition of a man biting into the throat of a struggling, live deer. For a moment Sloane almost thought the face resembled Jack Bristow, but then he turned his head and the angle of the light changed and he decided they looked nothing alike.   
  
He tried to remember any artistic ability Sydney had ever shown; he did not think she had had much passion for visual art.   
  
“I hope your complaint was not because I am a woman,” she said, digging the point of her knife a little deeper into the wall to finish the deer’s eye.   
  
Sloane stepped a little closer, unable to maintain his distance. He resisted the urge to reach out and touch her. Likely “Julia” would not welcome such a touch; he knew that Sydney would not. “Not at all,” he said smoothly. “It’s just that you have a rather stunning resemblance to a woman I used to know.”   
  
He looked for any indication, any sign that she knew what he was talking about. His eyes traced the lines of her too-thin face, a profile that he could have drawn from memory; a profile Rambaldi had drawn centuries ago. Her hair was all wrong, though, this pale, blonde color that had none of the richness of her natural brown. Her eyes were as he remembered them, color-wise, but they were so distant, so cool.   
  
She raised an eyebrow, folded her arms across her chest. The knife had disappeared somewhere into her very predatory outfit.   
  
“I have no family,” she said without batting an eye. “It must be a coincidence.”   
  
He nodded. Looked around their surroundings. “I must admit that this would not be my preferred setting for us to get to know one another,” he said. “Would it be inappropriate for me to invite you to dinner?”   
  
She smiled. It was not a gentle smile; there was a gleam in her eyes that would have frightened a lesser man. She named a restaurant in the heart of Zurich.   
  
“A fine choice,” Sloane said. But then, Sydney had always had good taste in everything except men.   
  
“Twenty minutes,” Sydney/Julia said. She was out the door before he could respond. He listened to the squeal of her tires as she peeled away.   
  
For a full five minutes Sloane stood in the warehouse and simply breathed. It took a long moment for him to identify what he was feeling as...euphoria.   
  
Then he went to his car and began to drive.   
  
He did not know what to believe. Part of him, a weak, naïve part, insisted that Sydney had such strength of spirit that she could never be truly conditioned. She was _Sydney Bristow_ , and no torture or drugs or abuse could ever change that. The realistic, world-weary part of him knew the truth. Anyone could break under torture. Anyone. Even Sydney.   
  
Yet he doubted. He remembered Sydney’s time as a double agent at SD-6, the way she had deceived him so effortlessly. It was not a stretch of the imagination to think that she could be deceiving the Covenant in the same way. If that were the case—if she was truly still Sydney, and not Julia, then he must find a way to convince her that she could trust him. For perhaps the first time in her life she was out from under Jack’s constant eye, his protection. Her only ally in this was Sloane. It was a heady thought.   
  
And even the alternative was not so bad as he had originally thought. Because even if she was Julia now, she was still Sydney at her core. She still had Sydney’s vitality, her intelligence, even her talent. And she had none of Sydney’s hatred for him. Surely a brainwashed Sydney who could bear to be around him was better than a dead Sydney, which was all he thought he’d had only an hour ago.   
  
By the end of the drive he had decided his course of action. He smoothly pulled up outside the restaurant and allowed the valet to take control of his car. It had taken him nineteen minutes to get there.   
  
She was waiting inside, a smirk on her lips and a challenging light in her eyes. She let him pull her chair out for her.   
  
“Julia, my dear,” he said with a pleasant smile, seating himself. He ordered a bottle of wine. “Tell me about yourself.”   
  
“I am the very best,” she said. It was so good to hear her voice, even with the accent. “The Covenant is lucky to have me.”   
  
That kind of arrogance was not like Sydney at all.   
  
“How long have you worked for the Covenant?” he pressed. How long had it been since the Covenant brainwashed her? He had to believe that she would have held out for a very long time.   
  
“Only a month,” she replied, sipping at her glass of wine. “I've been working with Simon Walker in Algeria.”   
  
“Oh?” He was very good at infusing a wealth of meaning into a single word.   
  
Her lips curved. “Oh, yes. Mr. Walker has certain...qualities...that make him an ideal partner,” she said. He couldn’t tell whether the words were meant to be a taunt. “Unfortunately, he lacks long-term vision.”   
  
Sydney had never been much interested in long-term thinking, either.   
  
“And you think I'm more interested in the long-term?” he asked, sipping his own wine. It was an excellent vintage. Drinking a fine wine in a beautiful restaurant with Sydney Bristow. It was an experience the likes of which he had long ago ruled impossible.   
  
Her shoulders moved in the barest shrug. “I’ve read your file, Arvin. You're a bit of a Rambaldi expert, like myself. One cannot believe in Rambaldi without believing that his works will take a long time—dare I say, a lifetime—to complete.” She said “his” as she might speak of God, as though it were meant to be capitalized.   
  
Sydney had _never_ been obsessed with Rambaldi.   
  
He shifted tangents. “Tell me about our first assignment.”   
  
“We’ll be infiltrating the home of the Nicaraguan ambassador to England,” she said. She looked away as the waiter came to the table. She ordered her steak medium rare and waited for him to place his own order before continuing. “He has recently come into possession of one of the Rambaldi batons. I believe he will be inviting you to an event at his home in the near future. I will be attending as your...assistant.”   
  
Was it his imagination, or did she place a special emphasis on that last word?   
  
She went on to discuss the details of their assignment. He half-listened, filing away the information for later; it sounded fairly routine, undoubtedly a warm-up exercise to test their partnership. He did not intend to give the Covenant any excuse to separate them. Not ever again.   
  
By the end of the dinner he had catalogued twenty-two things that she had said to make him think she was not Sydney and none to think that she was. Which made him place a large “1” in the “Sydney” column. Surely only Sydney could do such a perfect job of pretending not to be herself. If the illogical thought was tinged with desperation, well, no one but Sloane knew it existed.   
  
When they separated at the door, he thought of kissing her on the cheek, but settled for pressing her hand in his. He couldn’t get enough of her touch, it seemed. Her hand was warm and dry, her nails just sharp enough to remind him that she did not need a weapon to kill him.   
  
“Good evening, my dear,” he said courteously.   
  
He turned to enter his car and was just stepping inside when she called, “Arvin!” He looked up, half-expecting her to suddenly reveal herself as Sydney. Instead she shot him an anticipatory grin with a manic sparkle that was all Julia. “We’re going to have a lot of fun,” she said.   
  
As he drove away he placed a “1” in the “Julia” column.   
  
Working with Sydney/Julia—he alternated between the names so smoothly in his head that it was as if they were almost the same—turned out to be one of the more delightful things he had done in his life. In all their time at SD-6 they had never worked together on missions. He had been relegated to conference rooms, only able to see her work from a distance. Then, in that brief time when he had wandered the earth in search of Rambaldi artifacts and Sydney had sought to stop him, she had always been his beloved enemy.   
  
But now, now that she had come back to him, scarred and changed and as beautiful as ever, for the first time in their lives they could truly work together in the field, and he loved it.   
  
He found that he did not even mind the loss of his authority over her; he half-tried to give Julia an order just once, and the look she shot him promised death if he finished his sentence.   
  
“I’m going in,” she said now, in that soft accent that was unnatural and yet sounded so very right.   
  
“Copy that,” he said calmly, knowing that the words would be picked up by the microphone in his glasses. He eyed the security guards at the exits as he surreptitiously took another champagne glass from a passing waiter. “You’re clear, Hera.” The call sign had been her choice; it was not a name he would have expected Sydney to choose.   
  
It was their fifth mission together in as many weeks. He wasn’t sure what Julia/Sydney did in her time off, or even whether she stayed in Zurich or went elsewhere. They had been successful in every mission so far, though Sloane had had to significantly curtail his efforts to provide false Rambaldi devices to the Covenant. Sydney/Julia was far too perceptive for that; not for the first time he wondered how she had managed to deceive Dixon, who was one of the better agents who had worked for him, for so very long.   
  
His own disguises tended not to be disguises at all; he was too well-known, his face too recognizable. Sydney/Julia, on the other hand, was of course a master of disguise, and had come along on missions as a dignitary, a server, and several times as his assistant. Today she was breaking into yet another embassy vault.   
  
It frustrated Sloane to no end that they had worked together for over a month and yet he felt no closer to knowing whether Sydney—the Sydney he’d known—still existed, or whether “Julia” had overridden her completely.   
  
He had tested. Sometimes subtly, sometimes not. He spoke to her often, on the long plane flights and car rides, of his great love for Sydney, Australia, or how much he enjoyed movies with Sidney Poitier, or even, on occasion, “Sydney, an agent I once knew.” His favorite verb became “bristle.”   
  
She never flinched, of course, and he was never sure whether that convinced him more that she _was_ Sydney or that she _was not_.   
  
Perhaps the most convincing evidence that she was in fact Julia was her lack of seething hatred toward himself. Even back at SD-6 Sloane had felt Sydney’s antipathy toward him—understandable, of course, given his role in Danny’s death but still painful. She hadn’t tried too hard to hide it, not really, since that would have been unbelievable, but she had _pretended_ to try to hide it and that was why he had not doubted her much earlier.   
  
But with Julia there was no sense of pretense. When Julia looked at him there was no flash of disgust, no quickly-hidden moment of disdain. No disapproval at all. Just a sense of challenge, as though she saw in him someone with shared passions. Shared talents.   
  
When she looked at him, he felt a surge of answering heat up and down his bones.   
  
There was no alarm, but all of a sudden the guards began to move.   
  
“Hera,” he murmured, placing the still full glass on a table, “you’ve been made.”   
  
“I’m on my way out,” she said, sounding a little breathless. He wondered how many men she had already dispatched. “Some help would be appreciated.”   
  
It was the first time she had ever made that particular request, and he was instantly on the alert that something might be wrong—something more than the obvious. Perhaps she was injured.   
  
He quickened his steps toward the entrance she specified, hefting a short metal pole he found blocking off a side hallway. He hurried down the corridor, listening for the sound of battle, and found it not  far away. Sydney/Julia was facing off with three men, and for a moment she was so completely _Sydney_ that he could only watch. Her movements were fluid, perfectly coordinated; effortlessly compensating for the fact that she was facing off against three much larger men. Then she caught sight of him and shouted, “Some help would be nice!” and he waded into battle, swinging the pole like a baseball bat.   
  
He took out one man in the time it took Sydney/Julia to take out two. When all of their enemies were down, Sloane watched as she took a gun from the floor and calmly shot each man in the head. Protecting Sloane's cover, not hers. He couldn’t afford to be identified. She dropped the gun on the ground beside a body. Then she looked up, and her eyes widened, and she pushed him out of the way.   
  
He saw her stumble back, eyes wide, before he heard the sound of the bullet. He spun to face the guard who had come up behind them, saw the gun being redirected toward him, saw his own death, but before he could move a knife spun through the air past his head, end over end, to embed itself deep in the guard’s eye.   
  
He turned back to Sydney/Julia, whose hand was outstretched from the throw. They stood for a moment in that frozen tableau before her hand flew to cover her shoulder and the wound that gaped there. Not a fatal wound, he thought, but still quite bad.   
  
“Give me your jacket,” she gasped, and he returned to the moment, his heart pounding in his ears and adrenaline surging. Her pupils were dilated with pain. In an instant he swept off his jacket and placed it around her slim shoulders. “Now put your arm around me,” she ordered, “and don’t let go.”   
  
Even knowing that their lives were at stake—even knowing that Sydney was hurt—even knowing that were she herself Sydney would have killed him for taking this much liberty with her body—he felt a deep, secret pleasure at holding her so close to him. They moved through the crowd, the aging philanthropist and his assistant who had clearly had a bit too much to drink, without drawing much attention. As they waited for their car she began to shiver, and he could read the approval in the eyes of the servers and valets as he pulled her more tightly against him, offering further warmth.   
  
“Thank you,” she said quietly to the valet who opened her door as she slid onto her seat. She shot him a tremulous smile.   
  
Sloane climbed into his own seat, waited for both of their doors to close before saying, “Stay conscious, Julia.” He glanced at her as he began to drive, noticed her worrisome pallor. The tang of blood was heavy in the air. “I have a safe house nearby. We’ll be there in the hour.”   
  
She increased the pressure on her shoulder, wincing as she did so. “I’ll be all right,” she said tightly. She flashed a smile. “I’m getting blood on your jacket. My apologies.”   
  
He half-smiled himself. “I’ll send you the bill.” They drove in silence for a long time. The Danube Waltz drifted over the speakers of his rental car. “You took a bullet for me,” he said at last. “Why?” True, the wound was non-fatal, but she could not have known that it would be when she pushed him out of the bullet’s path.   
  
She snorted, but the sound came out more pained than she probably meant it to. “I assure you, Arvin,” she said, using his first name as she always did, “I have no intention of going back to work with Simon Walker.”   
  
Which was really no answer at all. He reflected, as he pulled in to park at the safe house, that the ones in the “Julia” column were coming to significantly outnumber those in the “Sydney” column. He could not believe that Sydney, even pretending to be someone else, would be willing to give her life for him. Nor would he ever have wanted her to.   
  
The safe house was one of his old ones, and well stocked with emergency medical supplies. Except for morphine. He himself was allergic, and he had never expected to be in a position where he would take anyone else there. None of the Bristows, he had assumed, would ever put themselves that much in his control, and he would not care for anyone else enough to risk this much exposure for them.   
  
He took off his belt. “Bite down on this,” he said as he held out the fine leather. She looked mulish for a moment—so much like Sydney—and he thought she would refuse, but then she shifted and winced again and used her good arm to take the belt from him and place it between her teeth.   
  
He carefully peeled his jacket away from her shoulder, watching clinically as the wound, which had begun to crust over at the edges, began to bleed profusely once again. He discarded the jacket, making a mental note to burn it later. Julia/Sydney did not need spare traces of her blood lying around for others to find.   
  
“I’ll need to extract the bullet,” he said, knowing that of course she knew that but also wanting to offer the explanation before causing her pain.   
  
“Just do it,” she said around the belt. He realized distantly, as he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, that her accent had not slipped once.   
  
He gripped her shoulder with his free hand, met her eyes. Then he dug his fingers into the hole in her shoulder, forcing himself to disregard her pain as he felt for the bullet. He found it at last, a small, almost innocuous hunk of metal, and pulled it out with a silent sigh of relief. He dropped it on the metal table. She was gripping the edge of the table, white-knuckled, but her gaze was direct, locked on his face.   
  
“I’m going to disinfect the wound now,” he told her, unwrapping a bottle of cleaning solution from its shrink wrap. He didn’t warn her before spraying the liquid over the bloody hole, not wanting her to tense up. She hissed, eyes fluttering closed.   
  
“A few stitches and we’ll be done,” he said in as soothing a voice as he could manage. He began to thread the needle.   
  
“You’re quite good at this,” Julia/Sydney said. He glanced up, questioning. “Your bedside manner, that is,” she explained.   
  
“My wife, Emily—” and his voice _still_ cracked when he spoke about her “—suffered from lymphoma,” he explained, wondering as he did whether mentioning Emily might cause Sydney to reveal herself. She had always been very close to his wife. It had been another reason why he loved her. “I spent many months by her side when she was ill.”   
  
He began to stitch the edges of the wound together, his hands perfectly steady.   
  
“My parents died when I was a child,” Julia/Sydney said, with such pained reluctance that he was almost certain she really felt the pain her voice expressed. Perhaps she saw the softness in his eyes, because her expression tightened and she warned, “They were the only people I’ve ever loved—so when you’re in a similar position, don’t expect bedside manner from me. I don’t do sympathy. Or gentleness.”   
  
This was, of course, the precise opposite of what he knew was true with Sydney.   
  
His lips twitched in a smile. “I understand,” was all he said as he tied off the stitches. He rested his hand on her other shoulder. “I’ll set up the cot so you can sleep for a few hours before we fly back to Zurich."   
  
She didn't protest. He watched over her while she slept.   
  
She disappeared for a month after that, on Covenant business or her own he didn't know. He only knew that the last time he had seen her she had been disappearing into the night in that red convertible of hers, blood still leaking from her stitched shoulder, and a month later she was striding into his office at Omnifam as if she had seen him the day before, wearing a tank top that revealed the healing scar across her shoulder.  
  
“Julia, my dear,” he said, casually closing a document on his computer, unable to help his broad smile as he walked around his desk to approach her. “You’re looking very well.”   
  
She did not touch her shoulder or acknowledge the injury in any way. She simply smiled her signature cool smile, looking beautiful.   
  
“Why Arvin,” she said, hand on her hip—no doubt to show that some or all of the motion of her shoulder had been restored, “did you miss me?”   
  
And that was that. The next day they flew to Ontario and stole Rambaldi’s diary.   
  
It was a month after that that Sloane became convinced, once and for all, that Sydney truly was gone and Julia had taken her place.   
  
It was another routine mission—the kind that was always most likely to go wrong—and another agency, it turned out, had beaten them to the punch. As they made their way down an off-limits corridor, the alarm sounded.   
  
Sydney cursed.   
  
“We need to go,” Sloane said.   
  
It was too late, though; they both tensed at the sound of guards running toward them. A plan was just beginning to form in Sloane’s mind—the obvious option, and yet one that he still hesitated to use with her—when Julia/Sydney pushed him against the wall, framed his face with her hands, and kissed him.   
  
After the barest moment of pause he began to kiss her back.   
  
He hardly noticed as the guards hesitated, watching them suspiciously before continuing past to apprehend the spies currently in the vault room. Julia didn’t let go, though, and neither did Sloane, knowing that they could come back any minute—at least, that was the excuse he used. In reality, he was lost, lost in her touch, her taste, her smell. Lost in the feel of her hands on his face, her silken hair twined around his fingers, the fierce press of her body against his. More lost than he had ever been before on a mission. Ever.   
  
She was the first to pull away. “We need to go,” she said, repeating his own words, and the fact that she pretended not to be breathless was very interesting. He did not hide his own breathlessness.   
  
She ran her hand through her hair—the closest he had seen her come to Sydney’s signature move of tucking her hair behind her ear—and waited for a moment as he straightened his suit.   
  
If it had been Sydney—not that Sydney would _ever_ have kissed him, mission or not—she would have pretended it had never happened. Julia, though, waited only until they got in the car to say, “Very nice, by the way.”   
  
Staring straight ahead at his hand on the steering wheel, at the thin white line that encircled his right index finger, he very carefully did not blush. Arvin Sloane never blushed. This was the closest he had come in a long, long while.   
  
Her red, red lips curved in a far too satisfied smile, and he thought: _Sydney is dead_. He was pleased that he was not so far gone that the thought did not hurt.   
  
After that night, everything changed, and nothing did.   
  
Julia’s behavior did not change in the slightest, which made him wonder whether he had been missing signals all along. He felt over-sensitized, attuned to her in ways that he had not been before. The closeness of her, in the car with him. The feel of her arm linked through his as they walked into another ball, another dinner. The fire in her eyes that spoke of some passion he still could not identify.   
  
He felt that they got to know each other—truly know each other—much better, too, now that his suspicions were mostly laid to rest. He stopped looking for traces of Sydney and started to learn Julia as more than an alias. Over the next six months, he learned about her troubled childhood, starting when she was orphaned at an early age and taken in by an abusive uncle, whom she had executed when she was fifteen. He learned about her training by a small organization that had taken her for granted, until the day she turned on them and brought them to their knees. He learned about the various tortures she had endured, the torments and abuses that had honed her into a weapon that preferred knives to guns and killed without remorse. He wondered how many of those tortures the Covenant had inflicted in the process of breaking her, and found that he could not wonder for too long for fear that his fury would overcome him as it had once before, after Emily was shot.   
  
He wondered, sometimes, what she had learned about him. Looking at her, seeing Sydney’s face, he couldn’t help but think at times that she must already know everything important there was to know about Arvin Sloane. Yet there was a certain desperation present when she asked him about his past, when she fell asleep on the plane and let her head loll on his shoulder, or even when he allowed himself to touch her shoulder or face, a desperation that reminded him that this was someone completely new.   
  
He never lied to her in all that time, except to call her “Julia.”   
  
It took those six months before anything like the kiss happened again. It was after another of Julia’s mysterious disappearances. He would have suspected that those disappearances might have had something to do with the theft of several Rambaldi artifacts from DSR custody—or the destruction of a Covenant cell in South Africa—if either of those events had coincided with her absences. But they had not.   
  
He took advantage of those times to further certain of his own endgames. One plan in particular had been on hold for a while, when he had believed Rambaldi had failed him, but now came back into play with Julia’s appearance. The search for the child he had only just been told existed.   
  
Six months after the kiss, it was the first time she had ever come to his house, and it was the middle of the night. He was awake, for whatever reason, sitting at his long, empty dining table, a half-empty glass of water beside him and a copy of _The Iliad_ in the original Greek lying, unopened, before him.   
  
The doorbell rang.   
  
It was raining outside, cold torrents of rain. And Julia was standing on his porch, looking the most like Sydney he had ever seen her—vulnerable, and needy, and lost. She wore a trenchcoat, but even that was plastered to her body by the force of the rain. Her blonde hair was darkened by the moisture, almost to its natural color.   
  
“Julia,” he said, stepping back, inviting her wordlessly inside. “Let me get you a towel.”   
  
She tried to smile, didn’t quite manage it. By the time he returned she had removed the trenchcoat; her clothes were dry underneath. She used the towel to dry her face, hands, and hair, evidently unconcerned by the way he watched her.   
  
She was dry by the time she was done, but not composed. It was the first time he had seen Julia’s hands shake. She tucked them under her arms and met his eyes from beneath a curtain of hair.   
  
“Julia,” Sloane said gently, touching her arm. “What’s wrong?”   
  
She shook her head, stepped closer to him. “I can’t—I just.” She stopped, started again. “Would you just—hold—” She shook her head again. He waited patiently, wondering what she was keeping herself from saying. She pressed the heel of her hand hard into her forehead, and the next words that came from her were raw. “ _God_ , you’re the _only one_ —” She stopped again. He saw the moment when she made up her mind, when her head came up and her expression focused, and she dropped the towel to the floor.   
  
She stepped in closer, smelling of salt and rainwater and _Sydney_ , and she kissed him.   
  
He kissed her back for a long moment before he found the strength to pull away. This was so wrong, on so many levels. “Julia—what—” but she interrupted again, pressing back in, and this time he was helpless to stop her in the face of her determination and his extreme lack of desire for this to end.   
  
Thunder crashed, and lightning flashed, and the rain had almost stopped by the time they made it to his bedroom.   
  
Three days later, Sloane learned through one of his contacts that Michael Vaughn had gotten married earlier that week. If he suspected that that might have caused Julia’s behavior—and perhaps a part of him did suspect—he was willing enough to believe otherwise.   
  
That night was the most vulnerable he ever saw Julia. It was not, however, the only time they indulged in their mutual attraction. Perhaps at times he wondered what it was she saw in him—certainly there were other men who would be more of a match for her physically, such as the once-mentioned Simon Walker—but he flattered himself that, just as he had made himself a father figure to Sydney once when she had needed one, so he now occupied some position that Julia needed.   
  
Two years after Sydney Bristow’s death, Sloane and Julia uncovered a Rambaldi document that spelled the beginning of the end.   
  
Per their usual procedure, they did not immediately turn the document over to the Covenant, but brought it back to Zurich to interpret themselves. It was a difficult cipher and took both of them working together twenty-four hours to crack.   
  
At last, exhausted, triumphant, Julia read, “And the Chosen One shall bring forth a Gift.” She looked up from the page, her brow furrowed. “The Chosen One?”   
  
Sloane poured himself a glass of water. “Hmm,” he said. “Rambaldi speaks in some of his documents of a Chosen One, someone he considered special to his plans. I’m surprised that you’ve never heard of her.” No he wasn’t. The Covenant would not have trusted even their own brainwashing enough to expose Julia to the Chosen One.   
  
“Her?” Julia said, taking the glass from him and sipping at the water before passing it back. He was still unaccustomed to—and perpetually thrilled by—such casual contact.   
  
“Several years ago, the Chosen One was identified to be an agent I used to know,” he said. Dare he say the name? For some reason he was reluctant to do so.   
  
“What happened to her?” Julia asked, perhaps sensing his hesitance.   
  
He met her eyes. “She died,” he said simply. “Murdered, by the Covenant. It was...a terrible blow.”   
  
Her expression was mildly sympathetic. “I’m sorry."   
  
He leaned over her to see the parchment. “This,” he said, drawing his finger beneath a line of text, “this is a formula.”   
  
“Bring forth a Gift,” Julia repeated. “Normally, I would think Rambaldi was speaking about the production of a child. I don’t see how that could be, if this Chosen One is dead.”   
  
He couldn’t quite stop himself from letting his hand drift around her side to rest against her stomach. He remembered that Sydney had told him once, a long time ago, that Danny wanted to have children. He had enjoyed thinking of Sydney as a mother.   
  
What would the Covenant do if they got their hands on this document? He knew all too well. Take Julia back into custody, torture her, perhaps rape her, extract her ovaries. All in the name of Rambaldi.   
  
And what could he do with this information? He could not deny that his mind was racing through the possibilities. Julia trusted him, perhaps loved him as much as she was able. And she was as much a Rambaldi follower as he was. If he explained a few things—left a few things out...   
  
He was surprised to find that the idea did not hold the appeal that it once would have.   
  
“Julia,” he said slowly, pulling back, taking up the Rambaldi document. “We have not discussed our respective loyalties much, have we?”   
  
She went still. “No,” she said after a pause. “No, we have not.”   
  
He nodded, looking at the page. “I would like to burn this,” he said, though it pained him to even make the suggestion.   
  
“Burn it.” She sounded as she might if he suggested torturing a child to death; more surprised, perhaps.   
  
“This page presents a threat to someone very dear to me,” he said, reluctant to reveal even that much. How strange, to fear that she might betray herself to the Covenant if her ties to them were as strong as the Covenant believed. “I would sooner see it destroyed than have her come to harm.”   
  
He couldn’t read her expression.   
  
“Even if that meant all our work was for nothing?” she said. “Even if it meant trying to foil Rambaldi at his own game?”   
  
Once again he was aware of the many ways she could kill him if she chose to do so.   
  
“Yes.”   
  
She stared at him for nearly a minute. “Do it,” she said.   
  
He carried the page to the crackling fire of the safe house. With great regret he tossed it in, and watched as the aged parchment was rapidly consumed.   
  
When he turned around Sydney Bristow was looking at him.   
  
“I didn’t think you’d actually do it,” she said. She had shed Julia the way a lizard sheds its skin. The cold persona she’d pulled around herself was gone as if it had never existed, and her eyes and face were alive in a way that he had fiercely missed. She was stronger and more vulnerable than Julia had ever been.   
  
“Sydney,” he said, extending his hand, though he didn’t know what he expected her to do with it.   
  
Her eyes went to the fire. “I would have done it myself, if you hadn’t. But...thank you for that.”   
  
“Sydney,” he said again, words abandoning him for once.   
  
“I’m going away, Sloane,” she said, calling him by his last name for the first time in two years. “I wasn’t going to reveal myself, but hard though it is for me to believe—you’ve actually been a friend to me, these past months.” She didn’t even look sick, speaking about that time.   
  
“Sydney,” he said one last time, and was not surprised when her fist lashed out and caught him across the temple, dropping him like a sack of potatoes.   
  
When Sydney showed up in his office a month later and slammed into his desk, her expression showed nothing but hatred. He searched her eyes for any memories of the past two years and found nothing.   
  
It hurt, to think that she had wiped it all away. But then, he did not think he would ever believe that she actually chose to remove her own memories. She was too strong for that. And he had no doubts about her ability to fake amnesia, even with the one person who had truly known her during her missing time. He knew what she was capable of, after all, and he would never underestimate her again.


End file.
